When truth is plainer in fiction

Photo: PIERRE LONGTINGil Courtemanche tried to call friends during the Rwanda massacre. He spoke to a man who must have been one of the killers.

Journalist Gil Courtemanche found fiction was the only way he could tell his story about the massacres in Rwanda. He tells Jane Sullivan why.

Gil Courtemanche dedicates his first novel to seven friends who are dead, four "unsung heroes" still alive, and "Gentille, who served me eggs and beer and could be dead or alive, if only I knew".

All these people live on in his book, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali. He feels as if he has made them a gift of new life. After 800,000 murders, it is the least he can do.

After four decades of reporting facts, the French-Canadian journalist has turned to fiction as the only way to tell a true story that is almost unbelievably hideous: the Rwandan massacre of 1994 that was designed to destroy the country's entire Tutsi population. Men were slashed to death with machetes; women were raped, mutilated and left to die; children were murdered or had their feet cut off so they would not grow up to be soldiers; ribbons of corpses lined the streets of Kigali.

Other journalists have written non-fiction books about the genocide - notably Philip Gourevitch, the American reporter who visited The Age Melbourne Writers' Festival in 1999 with his poignantly titled book We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with our Families.

Courtemanche's book is probably the first fictional account. To show the power of fiction, he talks about his daughter when she was young, saying that she found it very hard to understand the Holocaust. Then when she was 14, she told him: "Now I understand." She had just seen the film Schindler's List.

A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali spent more than a year on the Quebec best-seller lists, won the 2001 Prix des Libraires for outstanding book of the year, has been sold in 15 countries and is being made into a film. Enthusiastic reviewers have compared it with the work of Andre Malraux, Albert Camus and Graham Greene. "It will leave you battered and shaking deep inside," said one.

About to turn 60, Courtemanche finds himself hailed as a great new author of the accusatory novel. Interviewers in his native Montreal portray him as "an astringent personality", "an irascible, fire-breathing, take-no-prisoners kind of writer", drinking black coffee and smoking in his favourite cafe.

We have to imagine the cigarettes and coffee part because he is talking on the phone from Paris. He is eloquent, his English is excellent. There is no fire-breathing.

Courtemanche comes from an "average" Montreal family of seven. His father sold insurance. He says he has been expelled twice: from school, when he was 17 ("I organised a strike at 12. I was first in my class but a bad influence.") and in 1985 from the Canadian Broadcasting Company ("for the same reasons as school").

He first went into journalism for La Presse, the main daily in Quebec, when he was 19. It was the start of a 40-year career in print, radio and television that has taken him to wars and trouble spots around the world. "I was kind of ignorant; I began to cover war because nobody wanted to go," he says. But what began by accident has turned into a compulsion to be a witness, to make the world take notice.

The origins of his novel go back to 1989, he says, when he first visited Rwanda. He had the luck to make the right contacts straight away, fell in love with the physical beauty of the country and made many friends.

He was to go back for a total of five visits. Two years before the genocide, he made a documentary, The Gospel of AIDS, about the clergy and church workers fighting to stop the rapid spread of the disease.

In Paris in 1994 he heard about the killings. "I realised that most of my friends and colleagues would be dead," he says. Either they were Tutsis or moderate Hutus who supported democracy and social activism, who were first on the militant Hutus' target list. He tried to call some friends: he realised later that one man who answered the phone must have been one of the killers.

When he finally got back into Rwanda in 1995, each day brought news of friends and colleagues who had been murdered. Courtemanche wanted to bear witness to the slaughter. He tried to make a documentary but could not find a producer. Some day, he thought, he would write a book.

One day in 1999, he was looking at some notes he had made on the first day of his first visit to Rwanda, as he sat by the swimming pool in the Hotel des Mille-Collines in Kigali. The bewildered reporter was observing a surreal enclave of expats, international experts and aid workers, middle-class Rwandans, and prostitutes. The jackdaws and buzzards hopping around the pool mirrored the human pecking order. "All around the pool and hotel in lascivious disorder lies the part of the city that matters, that makes the decisions, that steals, kills, and lives very nicely, thank you," he had written in his notebook.

These notes eventually formed the first few pages of his novel. As he sat typing them into his computer, the editor who had worked with him on his non-fiction books called and said "It's time you gave me a novel." Courtemanche said he was working on a non-fiction book about Rwanda. The editor warned him it would probably only sell about 200 copies. "Finally, I started writing about the pool and I don't know why, I put the name of Gentille there. I found out I was writing a novel."

With models such as Malraux's L'Espoir (on the Spanish civil war) and Greene's The Comedians (on Haiti and "Papa Doc" Duvalier's reign of terror), Courtemanche's way into documenting the lives and deaths of hundreds of thousands of anonymous Rwandans was to focus on the lives and deaths of a few people he had known well, during the three months leading up to the massacre. Although they can hardly believe it, they know that soon people will be cut down like weeds.

Courtemanche has kept the real names of both the murdered and the murderers. He had to invent some things because he did not have their testimonies: either everyone was dead or the families had fled.

The horrors of the murders are offset by a gentle love story between the hero, Valcourt, an ageing French-Canadian journalist something like the author, and Gentille, a beautiful young waitress he meets at the hotel.

In reality, Courtemanche says, there was no love affair: they hardly even talked. "I was struck with awe at her beauty, I could barely talk to her. At the time I was in love, and loyal to my love. And I thought, I'm just too old and shabby for a beautiful lady like that."

When he went back to Kigali, she had disappeared, like thousands of others. But Zozo, a hotel worker and a great survivor, later told Courtemanche that Gentille had been in love with the journalist because he was the only man at the hotel who had not tried to get her into bed.

Valcourt has the chance to leave Rwanda and take Gentille to safety, but he chooses to stay. Courtemanche has explained this through a story about his own life. He once took up with a Haitian woman, a doctor, and took her back to Montreal. But in Canada she was seen merely as a Third World woman who had used her husband to escape from Haiti, and the relationship did not last. When I raise this story on the phone, he is prickly - "How do you know about that in Australia?" He prefers to explain more generally that if Gentille had gone with Valcourt to Canada, she would never be seen as his equal.

Some "politically correct women writers" who reviewed his book have been "frosty" about the love affair, Courtemanche says. "They ask, 'How come a white man can write about the sexual life of a black woman'? But curiously enough, the black women I met in Rwanda come back and say, 'Thanks for writing that'. They whisper in my ear because they wouldn't like their husbands to hear."

The hardest thing for outsiders to understand is why the massacre happened. It was not just a matter of warring tribes. Courtemanche says almost everyone is to blame. First there were the Belgian colonists, who declared that the minority Tutsis, with their fair skin and European features, were the superior race of Rwanda. In a microcosm of the country's troubled history, Gentille's great-great-grandfather, a Hutu, makes sure his descendants intermarry with Tutsis so they will survive and prosper.

Then in 1959, the Belgians do a complete turnaround and decide that in a democracy, the majority Hutus are the race fit to rule. The seeds of hatred have been sown. Gentille, a Hutu, has the tall slender figure and face of a Tutsi and is thus in mortal danger.

Then, Courtemanche says, in more recent years there were the French, who knew what was going to happen but kept on supplying the Rwandan government with arms; the Americans, who insisted the word "genocide" should not be used so the UN would not have to intervene; and so on, right down to various weak or self-serving individuals gathered round the Kigali pool, including a Canadian consul obsessed with her golf game.

Courtemanche has been criticised for his fictionalised portrayal of the Canadian commander of UN troops in Kigali, General Romeo Dallaire. Dallaire's hands were tied, say his defenders. But Courtemanche stands by his version of Dallaire's role, saying he could have intervened. "He didn't have to ask for permission . . . part of his mandate was to protect civil peace in Kigali. You don't have to call your boss to say, 'Is this peace or not?' "

And the UN troops were well equipped to intervene, he says. "They were soldiers of greater experience and quality than the Rwandan army, 60 per cent of whom had AIDS."

What would Courtemanche have done if he had been in Rwanda during the genocide? "I would have fled. Maybe at the beginning, some expatriates could have exerted some pressure on UN forces. But the moment the massacre was in full flood, there was nothing that could be done.

"If the Rwandans had been rich like the Germans, they would have built gas chambers. We tend to say 'Oh, these Africans, they are savage'. They are not savage. They are poor."

In Courtemanche's book, death and despair exist alongside the simple, robust pleasures of life: eating and drinking and lovemaking and fun. At first, Valcourt cannot reconcile this, but one of his Rwandan friends tells him he should enjoy himself too: "You have a duty to live." That's just what he was told, Courtemanche says. "We think about ourselves as having only one life. If something goes wrong, you hear people say, 'This is the end of my life'. But when you live with Africans, their lives are finished every day. They don't know if they are going to live the morning after. They begin a new life every day, every week, every month."

Some of his happiest memories are of events in the midst of death and chaos: a Christmas among the bombs in Beirut, a meal of wine and pate with Red Cross people on a mat in Ethiopia, with famine victims dying a few metres away. There was nothing more they could do, and they still had a duty to live.

He is working on two new novels. One is a fable about globalisation, which begins in Sydney during the Olympics. The other is based on his family: his father is very sick, and one family faction wants to prevent him eating what is bad for him, while the other faction supports him in indulging his one remaining pleasure. Courtemanche is calling this book A Beautiful Death.

Despite all the horrors he has witnessed, Courtemanche remains optimistic about human nature: "We're getting worse and worse in our capacity to kill, but better and better in our capacity to go forward."

Though the end of his Rwanda novel was "very tough, very emotional" to write, for the most part "there was some kind of peace in my writing . . . my mourning was done". And the book changed his life in an unexpected way. A young woman who wrote articles about non-government organisations came to interview him one afternoon. "The day after, we were living together. Last February we were married."

Gil Courtemanche discusses the manipulation of representation for political purposes with Anouar Benmalek, Tariq Ali, Sylvia Lawson, Michael Leunig and Arnold Zable on August 24, 8pm, at the Malthouse. A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali is published by Text Publishing at $28.